‘Give me time and I will set your mind at ease.’ In the dressing room, they manoeuvre the table around Mrs Frost’s hard little cot. ‘Hurry, hurry! Put it anywhere, we shall have time to straighten up when they have gone. Now run, run, and let them in. Remember to wipe the saucers before you pass them around, Maria dusts like a slut.’
Mrs Frost vanishes swift as a will-o’-the-wisp, but Angelica lingers in the gloomy dressing room, pondering herself in the mirror. From a distance she looks well – small and elegant – and she goes closer, pressing her palm against the tabletop to lean in. The glass is cold and her breath makes a little fog which blooms and shrinks across her reflection. She watches her pupils expand and contract, studies the edges of her lips which are chafed pink from the business of the afternoon. The skin around her eyes is as white and unlined as the inside of an eggshell, but she has a tiny crease in each cheek like the indent of a fingernail, and one between her eyebrows which deepens when she frowns at it. She can hear the girls giggling in the corridor downstairs, and Mrs Chappell’s admonishments: ‘What giddiness! Such unruliness in the street – did I teach you to behave in such a way?’
‘No, Mrs Chappell.’
Angelica cracks her knuckles. She goes back into the parlour and chooses a chair to recline on, spreading her skirts out carefully.
‘And will you be proud of yourselves, when some clever soul puts it into print? When it’s written up in Town and Country that Mrs Chappell’s nuns, the cream of England’s girlhood, play leapfrog in the street like a mob of brewers’ daughters? Well, I never, well, I never. Come, Nell, I must lean on you, these stairs are beyond my powers today.’
Breathing stertorously she enters Angelica’s apartment, supported by the red-headed Elinor Bewlay.
‘Oh, dear Mrs Chappell!’ Angelica cries. ‘So glad – so pleased. What a pleasure to see you.’ This is by no means untrue: Mrs Chappell is as near a thing to a parent as Angelica knows, and it should not be supposed that their line of trade diminishes their affection. Bawds are not, after all, the only mothers to profit by their daughters.
‘Sit me down, girls, sit me down,’ snorts Mrs Chappell, and she labours towards a tiny japanned chair, with Angelica and Miss Bewlay clutching at her arms like girls struggling with a marquee in a high wind.
‘Not that one!’ gasps Mrs Frost, her eyes darting in horror between the chair’s spindly legs and Mrs Chappell’s bulk.
‘Over here!’ squeaks dark-eyed Polly, the quadroon, dragging an armchair from the corner and sliding it into Mrs Chappell’s path at the last possible moment. The bawd, although sizeable, enhances her natural bulk with a vast cork bum beneath her petticoats, which emits a cloud of dust and a hollow thud as it hits the seat. She subsides with a long wheeze. Winded, she flaps her hands at her left foot, and Polly lifts it gently to rest on a stool.
‘My dear,’ huffs Mrs Chappell when she has found her breath. Her lips are mauve. ‘My Angelica. We are just returned from Bath. I cut our stay short – I had to satisfy myself that you were well settled. I did not sleep for worrying, is that not so, girls? You cannot imagine my distress at the lodgings I heard you took.’
‘For a very brief time,’ objects Angelica. ‘There was a financial misunderstanding.’ She glances over at the girls, who perch together on the sopha, watching the conversation with their heads cocked. Their skin is free from blemish, and their little bodies neat as mannequins beneath their spotless Perdita gowns, delivered from nakedness by a whisper of white muslin and the slenderest of drawstrings.
‘I have not introduced you to my Kitty,’ says Mrs Chappell. She stretches out her hands to the smallest of the girls. ‘Stand up, you.’
Kitty makes a studied curtsey. She is a spindly dazed-looking creature, with a long neck and large pale eyes, greyish like the rim on skimmed milk, her eyebrows dabbed on a shade too dark.
‘Thin,’ says Angelica.
‘But an elegant frame,’ says Mrs Chappell. ‘We are feeding her up. I found her down at Billingsgate, covered in fish scales and reeking like low tide, ain’t that right, girl? Turn around, then. Let Mrs Neal look at you.’
The girl’s skirt makes a hushing sound: the scent of petitgrain rises up from its folds. She moves slowly and carefully. In the corner, Mrs Frost pours the tea, a musical arc, and Polly and Elinor pass out the bowls as their abbess talks in laboured snatches. She breathes as if she were singing an opera, exhaling through each phrase before sucking in another desperate lungful and plunging onwards. ‘They told me she’d had smallpox. Very small pox indeed, says I, there’s not a mark on her. Quality, this one. See how she holds herself. I did not teach her that: ’tis her natural bearing. Show her your ankles, Kitty.’
Kitty lifts her hem. Her feet are small and narrow, in little silver slippers.
‘Does she speak?’ asks Angelica.
‘That is our next task,’ grunts Mrs Chappell. ‘She’s a mouth like low tide too. She’ll not open it again until I give her leave.’
They fall quiet in their assessment of the child; or at least they leave off speaking, for Mrs Chappell wheezes like a set of bagpipes even in repose.
‘She will be a deal of work,’ remarks Angelica.
‘I like them this way. The middling girls are the ones as cause me trouble. Been sent off to a dame school. Taught the pianoforte. Got their own ideas about what delicate manners are. Give me street urchin over tradesman’s daughter, every time. Save me undoing somebody else’s work.’
‘I was a tradesman’s daughter.’
‘And look at you! Not one thing nor another. You chase every fancy that comes upon you. I can hardly bear to discover what has become of you from one week to the next; if you’re set to be married, or running a few good visitors. Or you are reduced to a streetwalker –’ she is breathless for a moment, fixing Angelica sternly with a pouchy wet eye – ‘which is not what I trained you for.’
‘I never did such a thing,’ protests Angelica.
‘I hear what I hear.’
‘I may on occasion have happened to walk in the street. But which of us has not been driven to that?’
‘Not my girls. Do you consider how your reputation reflects on mine?’ She clears her throat and moves on to business. ‘Here, Mrs Neal, I know that your misfortune is through no fault of your own, and that you are thought well of by many of our best gentlemen. Ever since your bereavement they have been asking after you. “Where is our favourite little blonde?” they say. “Where is our dear playmate with the beautiful voice?” What can I tell them?’ She presses Angelica’s hand to her crêped bosom.
‘You can tell them my address,’ says Angelica. ‘You see that I am well set up here. And so near the square, ’tis terrible genteel.’
‘Oh, Angelica, but you all alone! It grieves my heart to see you unprotected. My dear girl, we have room for you in the nunnery – we will always have room. Will you not consider returning to us?’
The girls Polly, Elinor and Kitty have been exposed to a level of training more rigorous and exclusive than near any in the world, but when they feel themselves free from scrutiny they retreat into childhood, and now they bounce gently on the sopha, buoyed by one another’s fidgeting. They are impressed by Angelica’s glamour, and want her as an elder sister, to sing duets with them and teach them new ways with their hair. Late at night, when the men are at last stupefied, perhaps she will pass out cups of chocolate and tell tales of her own scandalous girlhood. They watch as Mrs Chappell leans forward to put a hand on Angelica’s. ‘It would be a weight off my mind to have you under my roof once more.’